


though the stars walk backward

by mine_eyes_dazzle



Category: Call the Midwife
Genre: F/F, F/M, Modern Setting, Post-Series, Trixie's daughter's going on an adventure, Trixie-Centric, all the faves will feature
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-06-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 18:01:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 12,561
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23881225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mine_eyes_dazzle/pseuds/mine_eyes_dazzle
Summary: 2015. Hotline Bling has been in the charts for what seems like forever. Mad Max has just hit the cinemas. Adele is about to release her third album. And Julia Franklin's mother is still listening to the stupid dansette. Raised in a home where the past is never discussed, two letters in pastel-coloured envelopes send Julia on a journey into the past in the hope that her mother might just have a birthday to remember.-- Trixie's daughter goes on a journey to discover just what her mother got up to in the fifties and sixties and why she has never talked about it, just in time for her eightieth birthday
Relationships: Chummy Browne/Peter Noakes, Delia Busby/Patsy Mount, Lucille Anderson/Cyril Robinson
Comments: 22
Kudos: 66





	1. Chapter 1

_2015_

Her mother is listening to the dansette. Julia can hear it as she walks up the drive, two Waitrose bags full of shopping on each arm, fumbling with the keys in an outstretched palm. She lets herself in, sets down the groceries and calls out. The reply comes from the front room, a soft sing-song, ‘I’m in here,’ and Julia can already imagine the scene: her mother at the back patio doors, sneaking a cigarette in the bright red chiffon dressing gown that was a present on her seventy-fifth. The dansette had been a gift too, but not a new one - Julia had taken it from its forlorn position in her mother’s bedroom, where it sat like an altar to a long dead past, and sent it off to one of those special hobbyists who charged a fortune to restore it. It has been worth it, Julia can concede, the moment she’d seen her mother’s face light up when the first bars of some long supposed-lost LPs had started playing. 

She gives her mother a moment to finish smoking (Julia had long since realised that giving up smoking meant giving up _regularly_ smoking, the odd one clearly fair game) and heads to the kitchen. It’s funny, she thinks as she begins to pack away the shopping, that the older her mother gets, the more things keep falling out of cupboards and attics and revealing little slices of the past that have been kept hidden. The dansette is one, dug out of some damp corner on the eve of her mother’s seventieth, a small burgundy hat another. The hat had been part of the altar of times past in the bedroom, but Julia had never been told the significance. It was enough for her mother to know and remember. Then again, there’s a lot Julia doesn’t know about her mother. Good old Beatrix Franklin, Julia thought, always a blank slate, even to her children. 

‘Mum?’ Julia calls out, just sliding the milk into its place on the fridge’s shelf. ‘I couldn’t get the apples you liked so I got peaches instead. I hope that’s ok.’ She’s just throwing her voice into the hall, hoping her mother can hear, and is surprised when the woman herself floats down the hall and appears in the doorway. Just as expected, she’s wearing the bright red chiffon dressing gown, with her make-up flawless even though she isn’t expecting any guests other than Julia. But that is mum, to a tee, always one for high society even if no one else was. 

‘Peaches are wonderful, sweetie.’ Her mother hangs in the doorway, leaning up against the doorframe, head tilted back. It takes Julia a moment to realise she’s listening to the music, letting it wash over her. Standing like that, eyes closed, Julia thinks there’s always been something melancholic about her mother. Something so utterly tragic in the way she carries herself. Her mother is the keeper of secrets, the keeper of herself - only letting out what she allowed and keeping the rest within. Repressed is perhaps the wrong word for it, but Julia has no other. Take the hat. There’s no question about asking where the soft felt material came from, or why it has such importance. Her mother is not someone who tells those kinds of things. It’s like there’s a cross and it is her mother’s to bear; it always has been and will always be, but Julia will never know what it is. 

‘Oh this is such a wonderful tune,’ her mother says, opening her eyes. ‘I used to listen to it…’ She trails off. 

‘You’ve never talked about the dansette before,’ she says. ‘Where it came from, I mean.’ 

Her mother smiles. There’s something sad there too. Her mother has always been a solitary one, but never once has Julia thought that the life has suited her. It is almost as if life had far different plans but didn’t deliver, and now these are how things are. That’s not to say that things haven’t been utterly marvelous the way they are, but there comes a time when a woman stops being a mother first and foremost and then what? Her mother has no one and no matter how many times she says she’s fine, Julia knows it’s a lie. 

‘Did dad listen to the dansette with you?’ 

Her mother seems to pause at the question, at the mention of Julia’s father. He is another subject they do not discuss. ‘No,’ she says, in the end. ‘No he didn’t.’ There’s something sharp in her words, something that says, _we will not discuss this any further._ Her mother is like that concerning her father; almost as if the moment they divorced their two lives became as separate as strangers. Even though they shared two children, Julia isn’t sure she has seen her parents in the same room for twenty, thirty years. In fact, her university graduation, when Dad had flown in from Malaysia and her mother had driven up from London, had been the last time she’d seen them together. That was twenty-eight years before. They lived on different planes of existence nowadays. 

Perhaps they always had, perhaps that was why whenever Julia had asked why they’d divorced, her mother had said, ‘Your father and I spent five years being fabulously miserable together. Now we’re free the world is far more bearable, sweetie. For both of us.’ Sometimes Julia wondered if her mother regretted it, though she seemed not too - for her father had remarried and had another child. He had retired to South Africa and lives in the brushlands, a little ranch; he often sends photographs of the elephants and lions. Her mother’s semi-detached in the Oxford suburbs is a far-cry from that, but then again, that seems to be for the best. 

Sometimes, Julia cannot imagine her parents together at all. But then she sees a photograph, and she knows: her father, dressed up in his best suit, dashingly handsome, and her mother, as glamorous as a movie star, on his arm. They had lived all over the world - Italy, America, South Africa. They’d been in Johannesburg when Julia’s brother had been born, before that Geneva where she herself had made her arrival. Her father had been a diplomat, a globetrotting one, maybe that was why her mother had married him. It didn’t seem, at least as far as Julia could remember, that she actually liked him. Though, then again, when she looked again at those photographs, the two of them dolled up, her mother looked at him like he was the sun. How things changed. How quickly too. It is another mystery Julia will never know, just like she’ll never know when her mother listened to this tune, or what that burgundy hat was used for. The keeper of secrets - that is Julia’s mother all over. 

‘You said you got peaches, sweetie - did you get the marmalade too? I’d just die for some toast.’

* * *

Just before Julia leaves, her mother, washing up at the sink says, ‘You couldn’t do me a favour, could you?’ She has just finished shrugging on her coat so she smiles, says yes, and waits for her mother’s request. Julia thinks it might be to check in on her brother, newly returned from a holiday on the French coast with his family, and tell him to call more, or to grab something from the shop - a new perfume maybe - but it is nothing of the kind. Instead, her mother turns to her, the glint of the pearls around her neck catching the dim kitchen light, and says, ‘Could you post some letters for me, Julia?’ Daughter watches mother peel off the soft pink rubber gloves - her mother wouldn’t be caught dead in bright yellow marigolds - unsure how to proceed. Her mother’s post is her domain, something she has been fiercely private over, more secrets to keep. ‘They’re on the mantelpiece in the front room.’ Her mother sets the rubber gloves down. ‘I’d go, but I’m awfully tired and I want them to reach the last post. You see they must go today, Julia.’ 

‘Of course,’ Julia rushes to say, so that her mother doesn’t rescind the offer. ‘Of course I can, mum, don’t worry. I’ll go straight to the post box.’ 

Her mother lets go of the kitchen side, as if a weight has been lifted. ‘That’s so lovely of you,’ she says. 

‘It’s fine, mum. On the mantelpiece, you said?’ 

Julia begins to wander into the hall, her mother’s voice ringing through the air as she goes, ‘They _need_ to go today.’ 

There are two letters, one in a soft green envelope, the other in a pale blue. Her mother takes good care over her missives, only the best paper, the best ink, the classiest of envelopes. Julia gets them for her sometimes, from John Lewis or Debenhams, never cheap. God forbid, not _cheap_. 

‘Please make sure they meet the post today, Julia, there’s a birthday card in there.’ 

‘Don’t worry, mum, I’ll make sure.’

* * *

Julia drops the letters on the passenger seat and reverses off the drive. Through the front window, she can see her mother, fiddling once more with the dansette. A new LP, but it’s something old and melancholic. She glances down at the letters. One green, one blue - Debenhams stock, the addresses neatly scrawled in the best pen. That means only one thing - these aren’t notes aimed for the council, or any other such perfunctory service. These are personal. Her mother reserves the envelopes deep with colour - greens, blues, baby pinks, lemon yellows - for her personal letters, the ones for the shadowy figures from her past Julia will never know. When she was a child - for these secret missives have been a long standing tradition - Julia would ask and her mother would dismiss her with a short, ‘They’re for mummy’s old friends, sweetie.’ And now here they are, her mother’s closely guarded secrets within touching distance. 

Julia pulls into the parking spot closest to the postbox just outside the small supermarket on the ring-road. She can make out the name on the top envelope, but blinks away the moment letters begin to cohere into a name. It feels like a betrayal, like she is trespassing. But then it begins to grow, the seed of an idea. Her mother will be eighty in exactly six weeks. And wouldn’t it be nice to have some of her old friends there? The same friends she has dutifully written to for at least Julia’s whole life, if not longer. There is of course Julia’s curiosity too, all the secrets her mother has curated and kept in her life. Wouldn’t it be nice to know where that bloody dansette came from? She closes her eyes. 

She climbs out the car and heads to the postbox, resisting the urge to look. But then the letters are in her hand, face up, and she goes to push them through the teeth of the box. She cannot help it - no, it is impossible! She fumbles for her phone, snaps two quick pictures and pushes them in without another thought. 

And then she’s back in the car, heart thumping in her chest, hands clammy. There’s still time, she could delete the photos, forget about this whole thing. But then again, her mother will be eighty in six weeks time. Surely that’s enough time for them to hit the expiration date on all these secrets.

Julia finds the photo app on her phone, stabs at the button with her trembling finger. And then there they are. The two envelopes, one green, one blue. One addressed to a Camilla Noakes, the other to a Valerie Dyer. Julia does not recognise either of the names, which is no surprise, but she does know one thing: there is no going back now. She has a plan and, like mother, like daughter, she’s stubborn enough to see it through it’s conclusion. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi! seeing as I've got time on my hands due to this little lockdown we seem to have found ourselves in, I thought I'd finally write the ctm fanfic I've been meaning to get round to for ages :) this is my first multi-chap fic for a while so I might be rusty but hey, I hope you enjoy! 
> 
> ps the title is from dive for dreams by e.e. cummings, great little poem :)


	2. Chapter 2

The addresses were scrawly, her mother’s cursive handwriting neat and formal but sometimes an utter pain to decipher. But decode it Julia had, scribbling it down onto the back of a torn envelope that had housed her bank statement, once upon a time, but had since been transformed into a grocery list. And now she has both addresses, sitting on her lap, the photograph of the two envelopes on her knee beside it. Camilla Noakes, who lives in Hastings in East Sussex, and Valerie Dyer, who is even closer, an address on the Wandsworth Hill in London. Julia has no idea who either of these women are, no idea how her mother knows them - but knows that if she writes to them and places the letters into these envelopes, that the relationship must have meant something. 

Julia takes a breath. She thinks about whether her mother will hate her for this, then remembers her mother caught in the view of the window, putting a new LP on the dansette - she still lives there, in the past, in all the memories Julia doesn’t get to know. Yes, her mother will be grateful, her mother will laugh, her mother will want to see these old friends of hers, Julia can feel it. She looks down at the addresses, runs her finger over the writing and considers her next step. It’s a Saturday in the school holidays - as a teacher, there is no prospect of work for the foreseeable, for the next six weeks at least until her mother turns eighty. 

A part of her says, go now. And then the sensible part of her brain says, no, wait, let this all settle first, maybe you’ll change your mind. She finds herself drawn to the addresses once more. _Valerie Dyer_ , who lives up on the Wandsworth Hill, only an hour’s drive if she’s lucky with traffic. Julia has no plans for the day, in fact going to see her mother with the groceries was it, lunch with her maybe, nothing more, nothing less. A quick trip to London might be exactly the thing to do today. Valerie Dyer, she repeats in her head. Yes. A good choice. 

* * *

It takes her longer than she anticipates to fight through the London daytime traffic to get to the Wandsworth Hill. When she arrives, searching forlornly for a parking space somewhere near where the satnav tells her Valerie Dyer lives, it is almost evening, the sun just beginning to find itself too heavy, sinking in the sky. As she finally parks, a good ten minute walk from the address on the envelope, she thinks, _am I going mad?_ No stranger is going to let her in, they don’t know her, she doesn’t know them. And anyway, she still feels that nagging sense that her mother will be angry at her prying into the past, digging it all back up again. 

But then Julia thinks about all those nights her mother has spent alone, and not just because of the divorce - her mother seems to only have letter-friends, friends who exist in memory alone. Such melancholy, such loneliness, and all for a woman who seems to adore being the center of attention, the life and soul of the party. It seems a shame, really. So she takes a breath, and then climbs out of the car. 

She twists down the streets until Google Maps announces she has reached the correct destination: 104 Granby Street, Wandsworth Hill - but Julia turns her head to the side, and stares. There’s number 100, 102 - smart terraced housing that stretch off back down towards zero as far as she can see to her left, but to her right, where she should find 104 Granby Street, there simply stands a pub - the Golden Crown. Julia frowns, and thinks, her mother would know by now if she had the wrong address, all those letters, all that correspondence. Doubting herself, wondering if the letters had served a different purpose, then reaffirming that her mother used the classy envelopes for nothing else, Julia steps forward towards the pub doors. Maybe the owner will know the mystery behind the missing 104.

There are a few customers milling around at the tables outside, swigging from pint glasses and talking amiably. Julia moves past them, towards the door, where a woman in her late thirties seems to be wrestling with the menu sign on the board. Julia hovers, unsure as to whether to just ask here, or to go inside. The woman catches her staring, pushes her fringe away from her forehead and swivels on her heel. It’s then that Julia sees the woman is pregnant, a swell of a baby bump rising under her stretchy t-shirt. 

‘Anything I can help you with, chick?’ Startled for a moment, it takes Julia a second to think of what to say. 

‘I’m looking for 104 Granby Street. I can’t seem to find it.’ 

The woman smiles, puts her hands on her hips and says, ‘You’re not the first. Gives the postman the right runaround if they send someone who doesn’t know the area.’ She half-laughs to herself. ‘It’s the flat above the pub. But if you don’t mind me asking, what do you want with 104?’ 

Julia clears her throat. ‘I’m looking for Valerie Dyer.’ She speaks far more confidently than she feels, which is more like her stomach is dropping into her knees. 

‘That’s my ma,’ the woman says. ‘Used to run this place before me.’ 

Pre-empting the question Julia knows will be next, she says, ‘I want to meet her, if that’s ok. I think she and my mother are old friends.’ 

Valerie Dyer’s daughter eyes Julia with a slight edge of suspicion, but then says, ‘Come on up, ma would say. I don’t see what harm it’d do.’ The woman shrugs, reaches out a hand in greeting, they shake. ‘I’m Fran, by the way. Ma’s just upstairs.’ And then the woman starts off, into the pub. Julia is left dumbstruck for a moment, then lurches off, following. They thread through the customers in the pub, round to the back of the bar and then up a flight of creaking old stairs, and Julia thinks that of all the professions an old friend of her mother’s could have, publican would not have been top of the list. Her mother doesn’t even drink - Julia can remember when she was a child, watching all the adults pour out their whiskeys, their gins, and then there was her mother with an orange juice, a lemonade. It ruined her figure apparently and her mother was exactly the kind of woman you’d expect to say something like that. So for her to be friends with a publican, that stretches credibility a little - how did they meet for starters - but Julia just tries to stop the questions assailing her as she follows this woman up to 104, the flat upstairs. 

Fran opens the flat door, calling for her mother. She sounds London born and bread, as if she’s barely gone any further than the M25. Yet again, Julia wonders how her mother and Fran Dyer’s mother could have known each other - this pub, and Julia’s mother’s sojourns to the continent with her father seem so far away from each other that Julia almost cannot reconcile the two. But then, she tells herself, there’s a lot she doesn't know about her mother. There’s a before, before her father whisked her away on endless diplomatic missions, before they had their fabulously unhappy marriage and two children and houses in South Africa and Oxford. There’s always a before, just because Julia doesn’t know it doesn’t mean it never happened. 

‘Fran, that you?’ comes a woman’s voice. ‘Cousin Gavin brought over a shepherd’s pie for Denny when you’re in the hospital having the littlun. Come here and-’ The woman Julia assumes is Valerie Dyer appears at the end of the hallway, drying her hands on an apron and striding forward. She looks around Julia’s mother’s age, eighty-odd, with a short, sharp pixie cut in a soft grey. She looks lively, spritely - like Julia’s mother, she seems active, fit, sharp even with the advancing years. And yet there is something about the difference in this woman’s rough, East End tones and her own mother’s cut glass English, something that screams: in what walk of life did these two ever meet? 

‘You’ve got a guest, ma.’ 

‘A guest?’ Valerie Dyer comes forward, untying her apron and tilting her head to look Julia in the eye. ‘I’m afraid I don’t have my glasses, so I can’t quite-’ 

‘She says her mother and you were friends, that’s as far as we got,’ Fran cuts in to explain. Valerie Dyer reaches out a hand and Julia finds herself taking it as she speaks, ‘Well I’m sure I can entertain our mystery guest by myself, Franny - the pub won’t run itself.’ With a wicked grin from her mother, Fran sighs, hand on baby bump, and disappears off down the stairs, calling over her shoulder, ‘There’s a Victoria Sponge in the cupboard, if you get hungry - don’t eat it all though!’ 

Valerie Dyer laughs, and gestures for Julia to follow her, talking as they go. ‘The cake in the cupboard, that’s a tradition from my time with the nuns, you see.’ 

‘Nuns?’ Julia says, raising an eyebrow as they enter the living room. Valerie Dyer begins to settle herself in a cream armchair with little red flowers bursting into life dotted around the material.

Valerie laughs, and there’s something about it that makes Julia laugh a little, too. ‘I wasn’t a nun, chick, don’t worry.’ She smiles, turns her head a little so that Julia feels as if she’s being examined, analysed. ‘Now, you told my daughter that I know your mother?’ 

‘Beatrix Franklin.’ 

Valerie Dyer’s face splits apart in a grin. ‘Oh Trixie, you’re Trixie’s girl?’ Julia finds the moment astounding - the way that Valerie’s eyes catch the light, the way they seem to reflect a softness, the glow of a memory caught tight and treasured, and the lightness in her voice when she says Julia’s mother’s name in a way she has never heard it before - _Trixie, Trixie’s girl_ \- and Julia thinks, Dad used to call her Beatrix, no one called her Trixie apart from him before the divorce, when they were playing pretend at happiness. Julia hasn’t heard the name pass anyone’s lips for almost thirty years. 

‘Julia, that’s it, right?’ Valerie says and she nods. ‘Your mother sent little polaroids when you were born. First baby for a Nonnatun in years, that was what the nuns told me.’ Julia frowns, almost as if she cannot quite make sense of what Valerie is saying, and she is about to put it down to the confusion of the elderly, no matter how at odds however with the sharpness she seems to possess. 

But there’s something about the way she speaks that means Julia cannot quite dismiss it. Valerie leans forward and puts her hand, smooth but with the ridges and liver spots that come with age, that her own mother - despite her vanity - has on her own hands. ‘You can call me Val,’ she says, ‘and then you can tell me what’s causing the long face.’ 

Julia coughs, feels her heart beating in her chest. It is almost as if she was treating this as an exercise in what if: what if she could track these people down, what if she could talk to someone who’d known her mother, what if she could know about her mother’s history, so neatly excised from her life. But now she is here, with Valerie ‘Call me Val’ Dyer and memories of polaroid photos of herself as a baby. 

‘What’s a Nonnatun? And what have nuns got to do with anything?’ 

Val looks at her again, with that strange look on her face, as if the answer should be obvious. ‘Your mother never told you? About Nonnatus House, the midwives, the nuns?’ 

Julia shakes her head. Here is the sum total of what she knows about her mother: she met her father in sixty-seven, married him the following year, and went to live in Geneva, where she had been born. A move to Johannesburg followed, along with the birth of a baby boy. Three years later, when they had been living in Paris, with a brief stint in Washington in between - her parents had finally had enough of each other and divorced. Julia and her brother had gone with their mother back to England, eventually settling in Oxford, that little semi-detached she had left her mother in that morning. Her mother cared about her appearance, never drank for fear of what it would do to her figure and had a crippling sadness - Julia wouldn’t even call it fear, just a melancholic edge - when it came to dentists. She loved her children and never spoke about her childhood or what happened before she met Julia’s father. Speaking of that, Julia doesn’t even know how her parents met. 

She has no idea how any of this - nuns, Nonnatuns, midwives - fits in. The dansette playing forlornly as she had left that afternoon had been a siren call, dragging Julia into the past, a detective discovering her own mother’s history. But she wants to know - no, needs to know. 

‘My mother doesn’t talk about the past.’ Julia takes a breath. ‘All I know is that she writes to you. Has written to you for years. That you knew each other, once upon a time.’

Val looks at her, a sad smile on her lips. ‘That’s such a shame,’ she says. ‘We didn’t half have some fabulous times.’ Val leans back in her chair, eyes sparkling, ‘And if you like, I can tell you a little.’ 

Julia doesn’t even have to think before she says yes. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hi all! hope everyone enjoys this chapter and is keeping healthy and staying safe in our current trying times! I'm hoping to update on Mondays in future if things go well :) hope it doesn't disappoint!


	3. Chapter 3

When Julia was fourteen years old, she found her mother in the upstairs guest bedroom trying to hide the fact she had been crying. But for the slightly smudged mascara, Julia might not have noticed. ‘Damn it, the bottle said it was waterproof,’ her mother laughed, trying to distract her. But she had noticed. And then they had sat together, side by side, on the pastel green duvet cover reserved only for special guests, of which they had none, and let the silence sit like a comfortable bed fellow alongside them. Her mother had been holding a letter, and at the top it had said, in neatly typewritten font: the Order of St Raymond Nonnatus. The letter was written in a hand Julia had not been able to decipher but she had been able to see the typewritten message at the top. 

‘What’s wrong?’ Julia had asked her mother. 

Her mother had dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief, a pale pink square with a flower, a forget-me-not, folding out over the material. Then she had spoken, her voice firm yet with an edge of sorrow that Julia had never heard before. ‘Someone who was once very dear to me has died.’ 

They had not talked further. That was the end of the matter as far as her mother was concerned. Almost as if in the act of speaking about the terrible thing, it had allowed her to neatly pack it away, to fold it up like the forget-me-not handkerchief, or the spare bedspread with its pastel greens like an empty field. Julia had been fourteen years old. She had forgotten about it, forgotten about the typewritten note at the top of the letter: the Order of St Raymond Nonnatus. And then she is in Valerie Dyer’s front room and there is that word, once more - a Nonnatun, her mother. She is thrown back, to that letter, that grief, not initially, but only when Val opens her mouth. Now they have cups of tea in front of them and packet of biscuits, the story can begin. Val says, ‘They were an order of nuns, in Poplar - London.’

‘The order of St Raymond Nonnatus?’ Julia suggests, trying to keep her voice level. It feels like she is slowly piecing a puzzle together, except she is blindfolded, and can only feel for where they fit, and she has gathered the pieces herself one by one over the years. Val looks a little surprised and Julia adds, ‘I saw a letter once,’ just slightly sheepish at the admission. 

‘Well, yes,’ Val says. ‘They were midwives. They lived and worked in Poplar in a grand old building called Nonnatus House just by the school, in the heart of the place.’ Val takes a breath, reaches for a biscuit and takes a bite. To keep her nerves down, Julia takes a sip of tea, her mind swirling, untamed. ‘Several other midwives from outside the order lived at Nonnatus House alongside them. I was one, your mother was another.’ 

Julia is halfway to depositing her cup and saucer back down on the table when Val speaks and she stops, arm outstretched, to look up and speak. ‘My mother was a midwife?’ She sets the cup down as Val responds. 

‘Yes,’ she nods. ‘A very good one.’ Julia slumps back in her seat as Val leans forward and claims her own tea cup. ‘I think,’ Val says, ‘it might be easier if I explain a little more, and then you can ask me any questions you like, chick.’ 

Unable to speak, Julia nods. Her mother, a midwife? It hardly computes, it is like opening a door to the past and seeing a different woman. Before speaking again, Val leans down to the side of her chair and opens the bottom drawer of the sideboard. She slides out what looks like a photo album and splits it open on her knees, eyes searching and hand turning the pages until she stops, a little aha slipping out. ‘You take your time, look through, as I talk. It might help to see things as they were. Your mother, too, as she was.’ 

Val hands over the book. Julia looks down. In the background of the photograph, there is a grand house and a mighty oak door at the entrance. On the flight of steps up to the door, there is a group of women: three nuns and five nurses, dressed in matching uniforms. All are beaming into the camera, an easy camaraderie clear to see in the way they stand, relaxed, at close quarters. It takes Julia a matter of seconds to spot her own mother, looking not unlike she did in the photographs Julia has of the time she first met her father. There’s something about the way she looks, neatly standing in her uniform, that makes Julia see for the first time the sense in Val’s words: her mother was a midwife - of course she was. And that’s when Julia spots it: that bloody hat, the one from the altar of the past in her mother’s bedroom, where it had sat next to the dansette before Julia had got it fixed. It’s atop her mother’s head, carefully fitted. And next to her mother, perfectly coiffed in that hat that Julia knows is a particular shade of burgundy, is a woman she can easily tell is a younger Valerie Dyer, smiling just as easily. 

Julia looks up and sees Val, smiling, as she traces the lines of her mother’s face in the photograph in front of her. ‘Tell me,’ she says, quickly. ‘I want to know, everything. Please.’

And that is when Valerie Dyer tells her a story. A story of a nurse and a midwife, peroxide blonde, who opened every introduction with, ‘I’m Beatrix, but everyone calls me Trixie,’, who loved her dansette and was a real trendsetter with her fashion, and was a whizz with the latest makeup, who did everything she could for her patients, no matter what, who loved and was loved by small, tightly-knit community of Nonnatus House. Julia sits dumbstruck for most of it, the boundless, unformed, unknowable mass of her mother’s past finally taking form. 

‘Why did she leave?’ Julia asks, when Val comes to a close. 

Val smiles, a sad little thing. ‘The same reason the best of us stopped. She got married.’ Julia has turned back to the photo album, flicking through. ‘That was all it took in those days. Some women carried on, or tried to. But then your father was posted overseas, and she got pregnant with you and that was the end of that.’ 

Julia turns the page over and sees a photograph of a bedroom, two small single beds with a bedside table between them, and three women sitting on the covers in their nightwear. Two Julia instantly recognises. The last woman she does not, she wasn’t in the first photograph - that photo had contained one woman who’d been older, mid-forties, with close, curled hair under her hat and with a stern but warm smile, and other a woman around her mother’s age at the time, with a smooth bob and a lightness in her eyes that made Julia trust her, even though more than forty years must have past from that moment to now. 

‘Who’s that?’ Julia asks. In the photo, Val and the other woman are sitting on one of the beds, raising glasses and grinning, and her mother is on the other bed, cheersing with a drink too. She looks relaxed, calm. She looks young, she looks like Julia did at that age, with shoulder length hair and an easy demeanor. It’s always strange seeing your parents in their youth, but it is even more difficult for Julia, who has been excluded from this part of her mother’s life. A midwife! And an exceedingly happy one by the look of things, the simple intimacy of friendship apparent between the women. 

Val peers over at Julia’s finger, pointing at the third, unknown woman. ‘That’s Lucille. She was a midwife too. We were all very close in those days, still are really.’ 

Julia goes to speak, but then bites it back, unsure on how to say it. 

‘Just spit it out, chick,’ Val says. 

‘It’s my mother’s eightieth soon.’ The words come out fast, almost uncontrolled, but then they sit, softly, in the room around them. ‘And I am-- I’m going to throw a party. I wanted my mother’s old friends to come. I know she’d love to see you.’ 

‘Does your mother know about this?’ Val asks, something twinkling in her eyes, a blush of excitement. Julia shakes her head. ‘Well, I think we can sort something out, don’t you?’ she says, leaning forward and tapping Julia on the hand with a mischievous smile. ‘Would you mind if I gave Lucille a call? I’m sure she’d love to come too.’

‘Of course.’

‘She’s the only one, you see, Lucille - the only one I’m still in touch with. We chat on the phone every month or so. She’s up in Liverpool now, with her family. Her husband got a job at the docks there in seventy-five so they moved on up.’ Val then seems to be struck by something. ‘And I think I’ve got…’ she says, reaching down into the drawer the photograph album came from and rummaging around. ‘Flick back to before the group shot, look for a tall redhead - I know they’re black and white, but you’ll see.’ 

Julia turns back the pages until she happens upon a photograph of the same bedroom as before, but this time it is a photo of two women by the window, one that fits Val’s description completely. Much taller than the woman beside her, both with wide, face-splitting grins, her hair seems vibrant even in a decolourised photograph. ‘That’s Patsy. She and Trixie roomed together before I got there. I’ve got her address here. She sent it when she and Delia - that’s the other girl - moved from Scotland.’ Val looks at the address, outstretched. ‘They moved to Bath, it says so here. Not too far. I’m sure your mother still writes to her too, we talk about it sometimes.’ Val smiles again. ‘So if you were looking for others to, you know, invite to this little bash of your mother’s, Patsy would certainly be a good shout.’ 

Julia takes the address, glancing briefly down -  _ Patience Mount, 23 Sandown Drive, Bath -  _ and puts it into her purse, remembering the other letter, the one she’d posted along with Val’s. ‘Do you know a Camilla Noakes? My mother wrote her a letter too, the same time as yours.’ 

Val takes a minute to think. ‘I think she was before my time. Chummy, I think they all called her. But yes, definitely a Nonnatun.’  __

Julia closes the photo album and sits back in her seat. She feels somewhat overwhelmed. It is like the photographs have opened a direct link to her mother’s youth, all these parts of herself she has kept hidden away. Was it because she was so happy there that her mother cannot talk about it now? Is that why she keeps the hat, cries over missives from nuns long since seen, and yet does not breathe a word? Julia does not know - just that, even though she has certainly seen her mother happy over the years, it has never been without that edge of sorrow, as if something awful had been lost - until she had seen these photographs. Her mother smiles with it, without the sadness, the light in her eyes far more clear than it is now. Julia wonders if it was her father, their unhappy marriage, that drew the light away, or if it was something else. She guesses there must still be more to discover, more puzzles to solve. 

‘Thank you very much,’ Julia says, reaching out and taking Val’s hands in her own. ‘You don’t know how much…’ She trails off, the words catching in her throat, but Val just smiles again, pats her on the back of her hand and says, ‘It’s fine, chick. It’s fine.’ 

  
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> hope you enjoyed this chapter and thank you for all your lovely comments so far!


	4. Chapter 4

Julia waited three days. Her son had called, wanting to meet for a coffee to ‘talk things over’ and she’d known things must have been desperate to a call like that, so she’d driven over to meet with him for a drink in a little place just off the main road. Jack, her boy, was twenty-one, about to graduate from university with a literature degree and absolutely no idea what he wanted to do in life. He called, sporadically, and came home every now and then to do his washing, but they didn’t see each other all too much. Despite that, they were close. There was no one else in their little family unit, just the two of them, the way it always had been and would always be. And so when he had called, she had gone to him and all thoughts of Valerie Dyer, Nonnatus House and any further trips were put out of mind. 

But only for three days. Three days was all it took to console her boy (when it turned out his need to see her was driven by the fact his girlfriend had dumped him) and prop him back up by encouraging him and convincing him the world wouldn’t fall in just because Eleanor from Leeds had blocked him on social media and unfriended him on Facebook and told him she needed time away from him. Once she had the confidence to leave him at his tiny, cramped Uni digs with his mates she trusted just enough, she had returned home and found, waiting for her, the scrap of paper with Patience Mount’s address and the photograph of a pale blue envelope addressed to Camilla Noakes on her phone. And then, she thought - it’s almost five weeks now, and there would only be two guests at her mother’s party: Valerie Dyer and Lucille Robinson - who, Val had told her on the telephone the night she came back from the pub, was very keen to attend and see Julia’s mother again.

That was when she had first been able to isolate it, the swirl of pain that was beginning to burn in her chest. She sat at the table with the letter and the photograph and she knew that it was guilt. Guilt at having gone behind her mother’s back, at having peered behind the curtain and seen, really seen, the woman she was. 

* * *

Lawrie lives a thirty minute drive from Julia. She knew he had been out of the country, but that he would be back now. And if there is ever a time to need your brother, that time was now. Ever since she had been to see Valerie Dyer, had discovered that her mother had been a nurse and a midwife, she had been plagued by the guilt that sat hot in her chest. These were her mother’s secrets, ones she had for whatever reason decided to keep. What is Julia doing running around and unfurling it all? 

Her brother greets her on the doorstep, arms wide. As they tumble back into the house, Julia can feel an ache in her chest. Both of them, denied all those years of history, all that understanding. Will their mother be angry or glad? She does not know, that is why she came to Lawrie, for counsel. 

Lawrie sends her into the front room, heads off to make a cup of tea. Julia cannot sit still and instead shadows him, hanging at the kitchen door. 

‘Did you know mum was a midwife?’ 

Lawrie puts the teapot down with a clang. ‘A midwife?’ and it is there in his voice, the surprise, that tells Julia he is being genuine. She wonders what it was about that time that meant her mother cut it all out, excised that part of her life so completely. 

‘I went to see someone she used to work with last week,’ Julia says. ‘You know that hat, the one she keeps upstairs - the burgundy one, the one we never knew where it came from? I’ve seen a photo from the sixties, mum front and centre, wearing it.’ 

Lawrie turns to look at her. Julia is suddenly reminded of the day he graduated university, their parents on the lawn outside, dressed up to the nines - the way their mother had smoothed down Lawrie’s lapels and smiled in a way that Julia hadn’t realised until now was sad. They had all been so young then, and even then their mother had hidden within her all these things that Julia had consigned herself to never knowing. And then she had met Val Dyer, and things had gained a clarity - but not only that, she had seen another version of her mother, one whose smiles were not sad, one who was a friend, who had people who cared about her. It needles at Julia again, the need to know, to unpick it all from the seams. Her mother, the mystery. Maybe no longer. 

‘Did mum know?’ Lawrie asks. ‘That you went to see this woman?’ Julia thinks Lawrie might know the answer even before she answers; they do, after all, know their mother. 

Julia shakes her head. ‘That was why I came round.’ Beside Lawrie, the kettle boils. The tea bags are still splayed on the side, the teapot forgotten. ‘This woman, the one who worked with mum, she gave me some more names.’ 

‘And you wanted to know if it’d be a betrayal if you went to see them too?’ 

Julia tips her head back against the wall, closes her eyes, and then looks across at Lawrie. ‘I had this idea.’ 

‘Never a good thing,’ Lawrie laughs. Julia scowls but strides forward in the conversation regardless. 

‘Mum’s birthday is in a few weeks.’ Lawrie watches her speak, but doesn’t say anything, just raises an eyebrow as he begins to understand where this is headed. ‘And I thought it’d be really nice if all her old friends could come.’ 

‘Without asking her?’ 

‘It wouldn’t be a surprise then, would it?’ 

Lawrie says, taps his fingers against the counter top. ‘Tread carefully, I’d say. This woman you met, would you say mum and her were close?’ 

‘Mum still writes to her.’ 

A light seems to snap on in Lawrie’s head. ‘That’s how you got her address? Mum’s colourful envelopes?’ 

‘Don’t you think it’s odd that she still writes to all those people but won’t tell us a thing about them?’ Julia takes a breath. ‘Lawrie, I don’t think she’ll mind. In fact, I think she’ll be happy.’ 

Her brother looks at her, and she thinks about the two of them, when they were kids, mummy and daddy screaming in the next room. There’s a reason their mother lives down the road and their father lives a continent away. He might still be their father, they might fly out to see him in South Africa now and again, but when there’s a divorce like that, you always have to pick a side. They have come so far since then. Since their mother would hold them in her embrace and say, ‘Everything will be just smashing, sweeties,’ and they knew she was a liar, even then, even at five years old. But she was a good liar, their mother, always for the greater good. For once, Julia wants to pull apart the secrets, the ‘it’s for the bests’ and find the real woman, their real mother. 

‘Tell her. One of these days. Tell her.’ 

* * *

Julia drives home, Lawrie’s words ringing through her head. She knows she cannot tell her mother yet. She picks a date, _Friday._ She will tell her mother then. Five days. But until then, she can carry on, knowing that when Friday rolls around it will all come flooding out. A part of her wants it, wants to see her mother’s face when she says, ‘I know you were a midwife,’ but the other part of her is afraid. She told Lawrie that their mother would be happy to see her old friends, and Julia is certain of that, what she is not certain about is whether she will be as happy to know that her daughter has pulled back the curtain to discover all those things she has pushed to the side, consigned to history never to be thought of agaIn. 

But that is Friday, Before then, she has two addresses. Two women. She makes the choice arbitrarily, as she has little else to go on. Camilla Noakes lives in Sussex, Hastings to be exact, whilst Patsy Mount lives in Bath. Neither are long journeys, an hour and a half for one, the other just an hour longer than that. She knows little about either, though it is the knowledge that she knows what Patsy looked like, at least back in the day - thanks to Val’s photo album - that gives Julia her choice. She doesn’t know what Camilla Noakes looked like. She thinks that ought to be rectified. That and her mother has written to her, recently, so there is still clearly a link of communication, one that snakes back all the way to those days at Nonnatus House when they had been midwives: unextinguished, unshakable. That is how she finds herself in the car, the satnav programmed for Sussex, speeding down the M25.

She hasn’t thought about what she will say to her mother. Julia hasn’t even seen her since she went to see Val, almost unable to face her. It is like she has taken away a little of that veneer, the surface of silence that follows her around, and can see the woman, her mother, more clearly now. That is what drives her forward. The sense that this is making of her mother’s past, but also of her own: all those memories of her mother, unframed, unknown, a piece always missing. 

* * *

She arrives in Hastings a little after midday. The address is by the sea, just off from the beach - the road and a large, concrete barrier separating Camilla Noakes’ address from the rolling sands. It is a gentle July day, the air warm but not that warm, and a soft breeze rippling along the coast. Certainly not beach weather and Julia shivers a little at the thought as she climbs out of the car, parked just opposite the house number her mother had scrawled on the pastel blue envelope that had begun this how adventure. Julia wraps her jacket tighter around herself, though not as a defence from the cold but as a defensive mechanism to try and push away the voice of her mother in her head, the one that says, ‘I am perfectly happy as I am now, sweetie, why dredge up that awful past?’ Friday, she reminds herself. She will tell her mother on Friday. 

But she does not want to think about that now. Julia thinks, instead about the young woman in the photograph, the one Val had shown her, smiling as if the sky was blue and the world made sense. That wasn’t an awful past, as her mother had always dismissed her history - that was a time she was happy. Maybe what had come after, what it had all been sacrificed for, had not lived up to it and so it is too painful to recollect those days. 

And then she has reached the steps up to Camilla Noakes’ house. A warm-coloured blue front door sits at the top of a short flight of steps, and a handsome Victorian terraced house lies behind. Julia finds herself up to the doorstep without thinking, knowing that her nerves will get the better of her if she stops for breath. She reaches out, knocks, and thinks about that hat, that bloody hat. If her mother is adamant that the past is the past, why has she kept the hat? It is a touch of sentimentality, one that Julia hopes means her mother will be happy to see the old faces gathering for her birthday rather than the solitary dinner for three that was common in Julia’s childhood, though what with both her and her brother growing up and having families of their own, the number has swelled a little over the years. 

The door creaks open just as Julia is beginning to get nervous. A man, in his late fifties with a soft mop of dark hair, just beginning to turn grey, answers the door. He looks a little bewildered as he says, ‘How can I help you?’ When Julia cannot think of what to say, the man speaks again. ‘If you’re lost,’ he prompts, gently, ‘the tourist information is just down the road, to the left. Or if you’re looking for the old town, it’s-’ but Julia doesn’t let him finish, cutting him off. 

‘I’m here to see Camilla Noakes.’ She tries to sound firm, but instead it just comes out hurriedly. ‘I’m the daughter of her old friend. Trixie Franklin. Formerly of Nonnatus House, Poplar.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope folks are still enjoying this! :)


	5. Chapter 5

The man introduces himself as Freddie, Camilla’s son, and invites her into the house. Julia follows, wordlessly wandering through the hallway and thinking about why she has come all the way here. She keeps seeing her mother’s face in her mind’s eye, the way she was the other day, the last time they saw each other - in the flowing dressing gown, sneaking a cigarette out the backdoor. There are nerves in her chest, fluttering and unsettled - she does not know what to expect as Freddie ushers her into the front room. He watches her sit, then tells her that his mother is upstairs, resting. 

Julia watches as Freddie disappears from view, just leaving the soft sound of feet on floorboards in his wake. She takes the moment to look around, to absorb her new surroundings. The house feels homely, lived in - the kind of home you can state, definitively, has been loved. From above her, she can hear the sound of footsteps, and the low thrum of conversation. There is a rumbling in her chest, a sense of anticipation, coupled with nerves, building and building. Has she made the right choice? She doesn’t know, keeps thinking back to the conversation with Lawrie, and seeing her mother’s face, again and again - both her face as she is now, and before, in the photograph Valerie Dyer showed her, in her twenties, smiling and meaning it. 

Before she can change her mind, flee this cosy, neat living room and turn her back on piecing together this puzzle, the man who let her in - Freddie - appears in the doorway once more. He has an open face, kind; he can’t be more than ten years older than her, she would hazard a guess. He is the sort of person who you like, instantly, despite yourself, despite realising you barely know the man, have swapped less than five words, and don’t know a thing about him. And yet -- and yet, a part of Julia might trust him already, and just the sight of him eases the nerves a little. 

‘My mother’s just getting ready,’ he explains, fussing around the room, neatening mats and stacks of books, tidying away magazines and tea cups. ‘I was just visiting, checking in on her, you see. I live about half an hour away, but sometimes mum needs a little help in the mornings.’ Julia nods as he speaks, watches him move carefully around the room, sees the way he lovingly sets the room to rights again. ‘So you’re Trixie Franklin’s daughter?’ he says, finishing up his cleaning and turning to face her. He is standing in front of the window, the early afternoon light haloing him in a soft glow. 

‘Yes,’ Julia says, leaning forward as if to meet his words. 

‘Lovely woman,’ he says, and for a moment, Julia wonders if everyone in the whole world knows her mother. It’s strange, before she came here, before she met Valerie Dyer, Julia would have cast her mother as a solitary figure, vivacious and bubbly at parties, but who always came home to an empty house at the end of it. Someone who preferred the company of no one, and silence, rather than anything else. It had always struck Julia as odd, a strange kind of paradox - one that she always considered every time she saw her mother out and about, as if she lit up around other people, craved their conversation, their dynamic stories, being the centre of attention, and yet the light faded the very moment she left, almost as if it was a performance, an act, and in reality her mother didn’t need any of that, or friends, or company. Now she is coming to see a second side to her mother, one that hovers in between - not the life and soul of the party, someone who lived for action, dynamism, talking and talking and socialising, but not the single soul Julia knew, who lived alone and barely spoke to any one bar her children. No, the woman she is coming to see more clearly lies in between: vivacious, yet partially an act; someone who only lets a select few in, but can turn it on for the rest, for the masses. Julia is starting to realise that Freddie Noakes and his mother, like Valerie Dyer, were part of the chosen few, the ones her mother let in. The side Julia has never seen, almost as if that side to her life has been cut out and removed. 

‘If you don't mind me asking,’ Julia starts, ‘I was just wondering how you knew my mother.’ She attempts some quick calculations - if this man is ten years older than her, that would have her mother in her twenties when he was born, young and free. Around the same time as that photograph, she wonders, where her mother had smiled and smiled and it had reached her eyes. 

‘My ma and your ma, they worked together. At Nonnatus House, with the nuns?’ he says, somewhat hesitantly, as if he thinks she should already know this. Julia nods, but thinks about how she would have reacted if she had not gone to see Valerie Dyer first - in fact, how she  _ had  _ reacted there on hearing the words Nonnatus House for the first time. ‘Your mother helped deliver me, actually,’ Freddie laughs. ‘They all did, all the midwives. Perks of the job, I suppose.’ 

Julia doesn’t say anything, not that she would have known what to say, because at that moment, the door to the living room creaks open. A elderly woman, almost the height of the doorway, enters, walking with the aid of a stick, the other hand still smoothing down a short, grey bob. She has thick-rimmed glasses on her face, and a soft, yet welcoming smile - the kind that invites you to smile too, as if you are all in on some joke. 

‘I’m so utterly sorry to have kept you waiting,’ she says, slowly, the words clipped and focused, as if there is a great effort in speaking. She walks, with the assistance of the stick, to a warm, green armchair by the window, and her son helps her to get comfortable. ‘I’m afraid,’ she says, slowly once more, ‘there was an unfortunate incident with a stroke. Bally nuisance. But my speech isn’t what it was.’ 

Julia shrinks into herself a little, ashamed a little at her thoughts about her speech and the stick she used to walk. 

‘No, don’t look like that,’ Camilla Noakes says, ‘it takes more than a stroke to knock a girl down, eh Freddie.’ She jostles her son, who looks at Julia and shakes his head a little, as if to say, mothers, who’d have them? But there is real warmth there, the bond of mother to son strong and clear. ‘He said you were Trixie’s daughter. Now I’m afraid Trixie and I haven’t seen each other in quite sometime - the Poplar Women’s disco of nineteen seventy might have been the last I saw your ma,’ Camilla explains. 

Julia nods, slowly, but before she can speak, Camilla Noakes is off again. ‘Oh, I feel frightfully rude, I haven’t asked your name, or introduced myself. Though, you probably know who I am anyway.’ She reaches out a hand that Julia shakes and says, ‘I’m Camilla, though everyone calls me Chummy.’ 

‘Julia,’ she replies. 

‘Julia, oh yes I remember now. How could I forget.’ 

‘You said you haven’t seen my mother since nineteen-seventy?’ 

‘Oh but we write. We always have. It is so awfully nice to keep in contact with one’s friends,’ Chummy - Julia has to remind herself to think of the woman sitting opposite as Chummy - explains. ‘So, what can I do for you, Julia?’ 

Julia folds and unfolds her hands in her hap as she thinks about what to say. Eventually she settles on, ‘It’s my mother’s birthday in a few weeks.’ Something in Chummy’s eyes seems to light up, as Julia continues, ‘She’ll be turning eighty.’ 

‘Oh, please tell me you’ll be throwing the most fabulous of parties?’ 

Julia cannot help but smile. ‘That’s the general idea.’ 

Chummy claps her hands together, smiling widely. ‘You see, my Freddie tries to do all he can for me, but it has got awfully lonely here all alone after my dear husband passed on. And it would be ever so charming to see everyone again.’ Chummy pauses, reaching up with her hand and wiping at her eyes, underneath her glasses. ‘We write, you know, but it’s not the same, is it?’ 

‘No,’ Julia replies. Something is stabbing at her, in the chest - the way Chummy had seemed so emotional, so touched by Julia’s invitation to the party. And that is when she begins to realise that the events of all those years ago - those assembled women on the Nonnatus House steps, the others who came before - there was a bond there, unbreakable, snaking through the years. Her mother writes, and writes and never sees, but writes nonetheless, simply because of that bond, of the fact they cannot seem to shake it off. 

When Julia begins speaking again, she is hesitant, slow, unsure of herself. ‘My mother, you see, she doesn’t really like talking about all this stuff. The past. Everything. I was wondering if you could tell me something.’

‘Oh golly,’ Chummy says. ‘The passing of time does make oneself feel the correct age now and again. I imagine that’s why your ma can’t bring herself to tell you. It does have the frightful effect of making you realise how long has really passed.’ 

‘But you remember?’ Julia asks, leaning forward. 

‘Yes, I remember.’ Chummy pauses, taking Julia’s face in, her eyes darting around behind the large spectacles. ‘You really do have the shape of your mother in your face,’ she says, in the end. ‘And I’m afraid I wouldn’t know where to start with recollections or memories. Age, you know - the great leveller.’ Chummy looks away, and Julia finds her gaze has settled on the photographs on the mantelpiece - one of which looked like a family shot, parents and small boy: Chummy, her husband and her son. Her own mother has no photographs on her mantle, just the hat upstairs and the dansette playing memories on the regular. 

‘That’s my Peter,’ Chummy says, after a while, nodding at the picture. ‘He died ten years ago now, just before I had my stroke.’ There is a sadness in the room now, something heavy like a cloud above them, and yet there is something else in the way she speaks: a reverence, an adoration. Julia gets the sense that Peter was her world, nothing less. ‘That’s why, I guess. Why I am having trouble bringing myself round to remembering for you. You see, your mother was there when I met him, came to my wedding, helped deliver my boy. It’s all tangled up together…’ Chummy trails off, voice quite. 

‘It’s ok,’ Julia says. ‘I understand. My mother - I don’t know the reasons - but she doesn’t like remembering either.’ 

Chummy nods, reaches up and takes off her glasses, dabbing at her cheeks. ‘He was a wonderful man,’ she says, eventually. ‘And your mother was a wonderful woman,’ she continues, her voice taking on a steely edge, something firm in it now - like there has been a decision not to forget, but to remember, and to be happy, not sad, in doing so. ‘She taught me all I know about makeup. And how to draw stockings on with eyeliner, though I wasn’t very good,’ she laughs. ‘And she was a fabulous midwife. Natural talent, easy rapport with the patients, could get firm when needed.’ 

‘Would you believe me if I said I didn’t even know my mother was a midwife until the other day?’ 

Chummy looks at her again, replacing her glasses on her face, and her eyes studying her face. ‘The way the world was, those days - well, let’s just say, once you get married, start a family - the days of Nonnatus House felt a long time ago. Even though I went back often, afterwards. But your mother - she left, with your father, and she went abroad - very exciting - but that’s very far from Poplar.’ 

Chummy’s gaze has lingered. Julia looks across, and for the first time, sees the woman her mother would have known. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, sorry this chapter's a bit late! hope you enjoy it anyway! :)


	6. Chapter 6

She calls Lawrie from outside Camilla Noakes’ house, on the pavement just before the beach begins. He usually answers on the third ring and she folds her arms across her chest as she waits for the call to connect. When he speaks, his name floating out, she doesn’t quite know what to say, the words floundering in her mouth before she can verbalise them. 

‘Julia?’ 

‘Lawrie,’ she breathes out. Her mind is rolling through her thoughts without stopping, uncontrolled and unformed. All she can think about is the way her mother’s life is slowly moving from black and white silence, to bright, dazzling colour - stitched together photographs and scattered recollections are bringing it to life. But she cannot think how to put this to Lawrie, how to explain how she is feeling - how the moment feels heightened, how, almost, she feels as if she could cry. Her mother, the midwife - her mother who lived and breathed and worked in Poplar, all that life, cut out and the pretence raised it never occurred. ‘I’m thinking of going to Bath,’ she says in the end, once the moment has passed and she feels like crying. 

‘Bath?’ Lawrie echoes. 

‘It’s where one of mum’s old friends lives,’ she explains. Lawrie mumbles something unclear and then she speaks again. ‘I’d like it if you could come too?’ 

‘Julia, I don’t know-’ 

‘Please.’ She can hear him breathing, softly, on the other end of the line. ‘I think it’d really help you see mum… see her in a different light.’ 

* * *

Julia swings back to pick Lawrie up and then they hit the road. She can sense how uneasy he feels, as they twist through the back roads to reach the motorway; it sits beside them like an unwelcome passenger. They don’t talk much, at least to begin with, but she is glad to have convinced him to accompany her on the visit to Patsy Mount’s address. A part of her knows that this journey - these discoveries about her mother - it is not just hers, it is Lawrie’s too. But he doesn’t understand, not yet, about the way that going back can help to move forward. 

She tells him about Camilla Noakes as they buzz down the motorway, and he murmurs along as she talks, saying little. When they reach the turn-off for Bath, the day is beginning to fade, the evening setting in, and Lawrie turns to look at her in the driver’s seat. ‘How did mum know this woman?’ 

They come to a soft halt at a set of traffic lights. Julia leans on the steering wheel and glances over at her brother. ‘They worked together. Back in the day. In Poplar, as midwives.’ 

‘And you got her address off the woman from the pub.’ 

‘Valerie Dyer, yes,’ Julia explains, letting the car roll forward as the lights change. ‘She said they used to room together, this Patsy and mum.’ 

Lawrie nods slowly. She can see something in his eyes, now he has allowed himself time to think about it. He can feel it too, the weight of a history unknown. And he is beginning to understand why Julia has started this, the way it feels to click these disparate pieces of their mother’s past together. 

‘I’m going to go talk to mum, on Friday.’ It is still five days away. She hadn’t banked on going to see Patsy so soon, but it feels like they are strapped in now on a rollercoaster ride they cannot stop. She wants to know and she cannot wait to have that knowledge. But Friday will still soon roll around and she will have to tell her mother what she has been up to. It sits like a lead weight in her chest. 

‘Good,’ Lawrie says. ‘That’s good.’ 

* * *

They arrive just as the sun has set. There was a moment they got lost in the winding back streets, but eventually, they park up and stare across the street at the address Julia was given by Valerie Dyer. It is a thin but tall building in a row of terraces, with a bright green front door. They sit in silence, waiting, but unsure as for what. Eventually the moment is broken when the green front door opens and a woman emerges. 

‘That her?’ Lawrie asks. 

Julia looks across the street. The woman is tall, with elegant ashen-grey hair in a swept bun at the back of her head. She thinks about the photograph she saw, black and white, in Valerie Dyer’s living room. It might have been from nearly fifty years before, but Julia can see the resemblance to the woman currently putting out a bin-bag of bottles into the recycling. ‘Yes.’ 

Lawrie already has his hands on the car door. ‘You want to do this?’ Julia asks him as he cracks the door. He turns back to look at her, eyes wide but firm. ‘Yes.’ There’s a pause as he hangs there, body curled round to meet her imperious gaze. ‘I think, Julia,’ he says, ‘I think I might get it now.’ 

* * *

They wait for the woman to return to the house, then cross the road and walk up, slowly, to the front door. Lawrie hangs back, Julia takes charge - she, after all, has experience of doorstepping their mother’s old friends. The knock rings out in the crisp evening air and the two of them hover, arms folded against the encroaching night chill. A few moments pass, then the door creaks open. 

A woman stands there, but not the one who took the bottles out. There is a hint of recognition there, and for a long moment Julia has no idea why - then she remembers, the photograph had two people in: Patsy and a second face, and it is that face, older, the hair faded to a slate grey, staring back at her now. 

‘Hello?’ the woman says, an unmistakable Welsh lilt to the words. ‘I’m afraid we don’t take sales at the--’ 

Julia lurches on with her words before she loses the confidence. ‘We’re looking for Patsy Mount.’ She glances back at her brother, who looks awkwardly down at his feet. ‘I’m Julia and this is Lawrie. Our mother-’ 

‘Julia and Lawrie?’ the woman on the doorstep repeats. ‘Trixie’s children?’ Out of the corner of her eye, Julia sees Lawrie’s reaction to the recognition - it is the name,  _ Trixie _ , she thinks that gets him. When she heard it for the first time, it was like stepping back in time, to when they were small. It must have been decades since he had heard it, and just as it had astounded her, he reacts to it too. It is also the kindness, the feeling in the name that hits them both, the sense of familiarity, recognition. It is the echo of a memory, there at the front step. 

‘Yes,’ Julia supplies. 

‘Well, you best come in then, there’s a chill coming.’ The woman turns to the side and lets them pass, speaking as they enter. ‘I’m Delia, by the way. I knew your mother too.’ There’s a flash again: Valerie telling her about Delia, a move to Scotland, then to Bath, but little else. Delia shuts the door, then leads them through to the living room, invites them to sit. As they do so, the woman they saw taking out the recycling -the erstwhile Patsy Mount, Julia assumes - appears in the doorway. ‘I didn’t know we had guests, Deels,’ she murmurs as Delia comes towards her. 

‘This is Julia and Lawrie,’ Delia explains. ‘Trixie’s children.’ 

Patsy turns her head in surprise to look at them. Julia can feel her eyes cataloguing her face, the resemblance, the familial links present there. ‘Well I never,’ Patsy says in the end. She and Delia come together to sit on the sofa across from Lawrie and Julia. ‘I hope it isn’t bad news?’ 

‘No,’ Julia says, once more taking the lead. Lawrie seems almost too stunned to speak, as if he cannot form words. Julia can see his mind working, the cogs turning - almost as if she can see him placing together the pieces from their mother’s past, the acceptance that there was a past at all. ‘It’s her eighty-fifth birthday soon. We’re hoping to have a little party.’

‘That sounds absolutely splendid,’ Patsy says. ‘Though your mother didn’t mention anything when she wrote last week.’ 

‘She doesn’t know,’ Julia says, quickly. ‘We want it to be a surprise.’ 

Both Patsy and Delia nod slowly. As Julia considers what to say next, the attention in the room is taken by the sound of footfall. She looks round and sees a small dog, a Terrier of some kind, trotting carefully into the room. He looks up and around, then sniffs. Delia gestures at the animal and he walks further into the room, bustling across the carpet and yelping slightly as he goes. He leaps up onto the sofa and curls in between the two women sitting there. ‘Good boy, Benny, good boy,’ she says, stroking the fur behind his ears. 

‘Sorry about that,’ Patsy says. ‘Deels is absolutely besotted with this young man here.’ 

‘He is beautiful,’ Lawrie says, the first thing since they arrived, and Julia isn’t surprised it is about something neutral - not about their mother, or the past, or anything like that. She gets the feeling he is still a little overwhelmed by it all. 

‘Well, I think it’s a grand idea to have a party for your mother,’ Delia says, looking up from Benny for a moment to speak. 

‘Yes,’ Patsy agrees. ‘Turn eighty-five in style, that’s what I say.’

‘We thought it might be nice,’ Julia replies, ‘to, you know, have all her old friends there.’ She takes a breath and glances at Lawrie. ‘You see, we don’t really know that much about our mother’s past.’ 

Patsy and Delia both look up at that. There’s something kind in both their gazes. ‘Yes, well, sometimes the easiest thing is to forget about the past.’ Now this intrigues Julia - both Valerie Dyer and Camilla Noakes had painted their past with her mother as something light, happy - good times with good people. And in the photographs she had seen, that had been the case too - her mother smiling, the way it had reached her eyes in a way it didn’t tend to these days. Now here Patsy and Delia are, and there’s something heavier in their words, something that hinted at another reason for her mother’s obfuscation, the denial of the past. Julia glances at her brother, who looks back at her. They meet gazes, and she knows he has sensed it too. 

‘What would there be for our mother to forget?’ Lawrie asks, this time, speaking before Julia even has a moment to think about what she intended to say. She had told him about what Valerie Dyer said about their mother’s time at Nonnatus House before she had left to go see Camilla Noakes, then in the car on the way here, she had filled him in on that visit too. Yet there is something else here, something unspoken, that fills the air between them. Across the room, with Benny the dog curled between them, Patsy and Delia share a look, one that says far more than words could. 

‘She had her struggles, your mother, you know,’ Patsy says. ‘With the failed engagement, the drinking - things that you wouldn’t necessarily want to remember. But that was all before she met your father, of course.’ 

Julia feels as if she is in fast rushing water, like the current is sweeping her along somewhere she does not know, and then suddenly she is beached on the bank, out of breath and lost. The words sit heavy in the air, as if when Julia moves, something will snap, or break. In themselves the words make sense, but they do not chime with the woman she knows - her mother.  _ The failed engagement, the drinking.  _

Julia isn’t quite sure what to think anymore. She looks across at Lawrie and knows she isn’t the only one. 


End file.
